![]() ![]() Her 2005 collaboration with husband Jon Halliday, Mao: The Unknown Story, also topped bestseller lists. Wild Swans: Three Daughters of China (1991), which begins with her grandmother’s life story and ends with her own, has sold more than 10m copies. It’s usually anyone’s guess whether a book on Chinese history will find a large readership, but you don’t need to be psychic to predict high sales for this one. Cixi’s long period of rule evokes Victoria her notoriety, Cleopatra her political manoeuvring, Elizabeth I. When he died in 1908, just before Cixi, new rumours that she’d poisoned him joined old ones alleging lurid liaisons with various powerful men.Įven a brief sketch such as this brings to mind three famous queens whose stories have been catnip for generations of fans of royal biography. The Empress Dowager’s side won, reasserting her position as the Qing ruling family’s dominant member, and the emperor was placed under house arrest. In 1898, factions linked to the emperor and to Cixi locked horns in a fierce power struggle. ![]() The final years of her life, as Jung Chang recounts fluently in Empress Dowager Cixi: The Concubine Who Launched Modern China, were equally eventful. ![]()
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